Popup Dungeon shows off its ‘build your own dungeon’ tool

Popup Dungeon is a roguelike dungeon crawling role-playing game, which is nothing new — but this one includes a customization tool that enables players to modify the game’s characters, weapons, abilities, and enemies. Developer Triple B Titles successfully raised $100,000 through a Kickstarter campaign in 2014 and entered pre-alpha in December for backers. Today, it’s revealed new gameplay footage including how its creation tool works. Triple B and publisher Humble Bundle are aiming to release the full game at the end of this year or early 2019 for PC.

As its name might suggest, Popup Dungeon has a charming papercraft aesthetic. Triple B’s inspiration for it came from tabletop games such as Dungeons & Dragons, and it pays tribute to that legacy with a “Dungeon Master mode” where one player becomes the Wizard. In that role, they guide the party’s adventure, controlling enemies, determining where they go next, and adjusting the difficulty of the gameplay by adding challenges such as a countdown clock. Out of the Dungeon Master mode, the Wizard is the primary “antagonist” in the game — challenging and helping players as a supernatural figure who wishes to test humanity’s mettle.